I was there because the Hilton was full. (We consultants always stay at Hiltons in order to establish our credibility with clients) The problem was that it was a bit far out of town so I had to get a taxi each morning which cost quite a lot. The World Bank has approved rates for taxis and when I told the driver what it was he burst into tears; cost of petrol, hungry children, etc. I immediately gave in as I always do. He gave me receipts but they wont refund me it all even though I saved them 80 dollars a day in hotel bills.

The Hilton was full because of an African-Indian summit.  I have never seen so many of these big potatoes all in one place before. Fat male kleptocrats waddling between their executive suites and their big official cars. The Equatorial Guinea Potato, Africa’s longest serving and, by all accounts, most successful kleptocrat, chaired the thing because he has been elected by his peers as chairperson of the AU, maybe because has salted away the most. He has also declared himself to be a god which probably helped. He was the one that Mark Thatcher tried to overthrow (alledgedly), a manifestly stupid thing to try and do to a god.

By chance the same day, Al-Jazeera (with the sad decline of BBC World under Cameron now the best channel by far) did a programme on how all this money was siphoned out of Africa into Eurobanks, particularly British ones, by African leaders who confuse state coffers with their personal accounts,  in far greater quantities than official aid flows the other way. And how the playboy son of the Equatorial Guinea Potato had just bought a 350 million dollar yacht, the second most expensive ever built.

His money is in British Banks, among others, it seems, now that the Swiss have made it rather difficult.  The bankers dont deny it; they wring their hands and say they are doing nothing wrong and while the world, and Africa, recognise these crooks as their leaders and the likes of Obama and the Pope fall over themselves to be photographed with them.  They are probably right.  But it must be galling to poor old Mugabe and Grace, known in Zim as the First Shopper, that he has had all his frozen while the rest get away with it.  Its not what you do that matters, its who you upset by doing it.

The final day of the conference was in the AU HQ, across town from the Hilton.  Addis was shut down for an hour when the road was closed. The potatoes did not travel in one convoy; the national delegations went off when they felt like it, flags a-flutter. I rather liked the old classic stretched red Merc with perfectly polished chrome from the Zim embassy, down on one rear spring under the significant mass of what must have been Morgan Tvangirai, The people of Addis have endless patience; they just sit, or stand, and wait. I suppose they are used to it. We arrived an hour late for our meeting but everyone understood.

Hilton prices are something to marvel at. They offer wine by the glass. Pride of place goes to a glass of South African cooking wine called Drostdy Hof red, which is very good for tough meat casseroles because of the vinegar in it, at 4 dollars a glass. I buy it in Windhoek for less than 20 US dollars a 5 litre box.  A Hilton meal costs 450 Birr which is about 30 dollars but you can eat as much as you like. I eat much more than I like but I try and do it only once a day.

It is Saturday 28th of May.  Outside the quiet gardens of the Hilton, with its roses and volcanic pool, there is bedlam.  Shouting, singing, horn honking and sirens wailing and the ubiquitous watching helicopter. They are celebrating the anniversary of the overthrow of the Derg, the stalinist regime that replaced the Haillie Selassie (another god and direct descendent of Solomon and Sheba). The overthrow of African governments is so often a cause of jubilation. The official advice to us foreigners is stay indoors.

I will take heed and write something about where they should put their curriculum, to the sound of Stanley’s organ concertos on iTunes. A consultant’s life is tough.

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I wonder if I am alone in regretting the rather negative choice of headline in this paper last Friday ‘Grade 12 results no cause for joy’. In fact the grade 11 and 12 results are rather good compared with most countries. What a pity also that the opportunity was missed to congratulate the teachers responsible, often working in quite strenuous conditions. But they will not be too worried; they are long used the view of the public that children do well because they are clever whereas when they do badly it is the teachers fault.  But just let me say to them all; great job, keep it up.

The problem with the system is not grade 11 and 12 but with the numbers that don’t get there. Consider this:

This year, 2011, 55 000 new Namibians will be born.  If the system does not change this is what will happen to them.
•    1 000 will not enter primary education
•    Another 12 000 will fail to complete primary education
•    Another 9 000 will fail to complete junior secondary education
•    Another 15 000 will be unable to enter senior secondary education
That makes a total of 37 000, or two thirds of our 55 000, discarded by the educational system and bound for the economic scrap heap.

This is not only grossly inhumane; it is a ticking time bomb. We ignore these at our peril. All the more so in that it is all avoidable even within current resource limitations.

The most unique and defining feature of Namibian education is the astonishing fact that one child in every five is a repeater. It is astonishing for three reasons; the first being that it does not happen anywhere else. The second is that it was a procedure used in colonial times as a control instrument and it really should not have made it past Independence. And the third is that as a way of improving performance it simply does not work. In fact all the evidence there is suggests that it has the opposite effect. There are far far better, and far more humane, ways of helping learners with difficulties as the 20% or so of schools where repetition is minimal of non-existent know well.

Even if it were shown that repetition was effective, the country simply cannot afford it.

There are about 550 000 learners in grades 1-10.  110 000 of these are repeaters.  They occupy the time of 3600 teachers and the space of over 300 schools. This is five times what is needed to allow all last years’ grade 10 ‘failures’ to go on to grades 11 and 12. It is almost enough to allow all our 55 000 newborns of 2011 to enjoy 12 years of education which is their birthright.

Each year we hear of thousands of learners ‘failing’ grade 10.  They dont ‘fail’. There are simply no places for them in grade 11 and so the Ministry uses the results as a means of limiting entry.  There is no standard required at grade 10 for progression to grade 11 because the grade 12 examination has been designed from the outset to cater for all abilities.

So I would like to encourage Dr Iyambo to take the bull by the horns and make the following three simple announcements:

As from January 2012:

1. No learner will be permitted the luxury of repeating a year he or she has already taken.
2. All schools must be required to do what the best already do; provide special programmes for addressing any learning difficulties that their children may be experiencing.
3. All learners completing grade 10 will be allowed to enter grade 11

His ministerial colleagues in Uganda and Tanzania have both done this in the last few years and it is working.  It gave their civil servants a few headaches but civil servants are paid to have headaches. They did it because Kenya and Rwanda are their neighbours and so are not unfamiliar with ticking time bombs.

The brinjals, however, are good and incredibly shiny and black.  Its a shame to cut them.

And everything so far is free of red spider. This is the first year this has ever happened. I dont know whether they are just busy elsewhere or whether my sister-in-law’s Neme oil recipe is working.  A bit of neme oil, a touch of washing-up liquid, dilute to taste and spray all over.  A friend here said also add sugar as it makes their little feet stick to the leaves.

I have given up on Namibian insects. They are never up early enough to pollinate my gemsquash so I’ve taken to doing it myself.  I snap off a male flower, tear off its petals to reveal its organ and then go round tickling the parts of any female flowers I can find. And all before breakfast.

Before I knew where I was I had a whole pile of bulging artificially inseminated green balls over all three plants. Then they got fed up of my crude attentions and stopped making female flowers.  So I chopped their balls off and ate them. That seems to have sorted them out; this morning as I approached there were three female flowers waving lasciviously at me. I got the lot with just one male. I wonder what would happen if I pollinated Moneymaker with a male gemsquash organ. Couldn’t make them worse I suppose.

I have a mongoose problem. Mongooses are very friendly little creatures that just love cutworms. My garden is full of cutworms produced in the cutworm hatchery that passes for my compost heap. Some get into the soil when I dig in the compost and the mongoose digs them up for breakfast. The problem is that he digs up all the little bean plants at the same time. Gardening manuals are silent on this issue.

Its a Yellow Mongoose, Cynictis peniculata, with a white tip to its tail, loves egg and cheese and barks at the cat making a noise like the shorting of high voltage electricity wires.

C. pen. taking a break from the cutworms

He is a solifuge spider which, like a lot of the things that wander around here is ‘endemic but locally common’. He has a reputation for chasing people but actually he just chases your shadow. He also has a reputation for shaving off your beard while you are asleep but that is only because his jaws look like scissors (the Afrikaners call him a haarskeerder)

I remember camping once in a riverbed in Damaraland and being besieged by a lot of them. They are hunting spiders and are attracted by insects attracted to the light. You have to be very careful because they hide in dark places like under your boot and its easy to squash them, which is against Namibian law. In the morning we found two squashed ones. We also found fresh rhino tracks; it walked right by the camp without waking anyone. Maybe it was responsible for accidentally squashing the haarskeerders.

Count the legs.  Not ten; the front two are specially adapted antenna called pedipalps used to hold his breakfast while he munches it live. You can see on the mugshot that they dont have feet on the ends

His eyes are a bit too close together. Royal genes in there somewhere maybe.